Project One: Visualizing Friendship

I looked around for tools for visualizing social networks yesterday and found two great things:

• An application called Gephi.
• A tutorial explaingin how to get started with Gephi.

In the tutorial Tony Hirst shows how easy it can be to visualize Facebook friendship. With a small Facebook app called netvizz you can easily download information about who knows who in your social network. You’ll get the data in a neat .gdf file that can turn in to a nice graph in a couple of seconds.

With a little bit of color my Facebook network vizualized like this (click to open full scale pdf):

The public interest in this visualization might not be enormous. However, it does say quite a bit about my life and different stages of it:

• The big yellow bulb represents my Helsinki network, mostly friends from university.
• The blue network are friends from my hometown, old school friends that is.
• On the right, between the yellow and the blue network you see friends from my student nation, Vasa nation. That is friends that study in Helsinki (yellow connections), but also know people from around my home town (blue connections).
• The green ones are people I know from sports (close to blue as that was something I did when I was younger).
• The red network is for people I know from Åland.
• The purple network for my Erasmus pals.

Considering that I didn’t know anything about network visualization 24 hours ago I am quite pleased with this result.

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